Fefu and her Friends by María Irene Fornés

I directed Fefu and her Friends as my senior thesis at UNCSA. In 1975 Laura Melvey published an essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in which she coined the term “The Male Gaze.” Its original context was within the film industry, pointing out how cinematic conventions reinforced a patriarchal fantasy. Two years later Fornés Published Fefu and Her Friends, which offers that the Male Gaze wasnt exclusive to performances on the silver screen, but rather encompass the performances we put on in our everyday lives. The play being set in 1935 suggests that women have had to bend to male standards long before the term was coined, and working on it in 2024 reminded me that we still do. This is not about beauty standards exclusively, but rather how we alter our behavior to appeal to the male perception. Undoing systemic conditioning is hard, but the autonomy we risk as women by being passive about where we receive our validation is critical.